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I would be against implementing a summary statistic that shows the input rate of all players over time. I personally hold the opinion that this input rate is not a crucial part of a player's performance. Concentration and multitasking are important in any RTS, but this is different from how fast you can input commands, and is not something one can easily measure with a number. I think adding this statistic would make it seem like an official idea that clicking faster makes you a better player, when in reality, I think this is wrong. In reality it's being able to keep track of everything, which is completely different and can't be easily measured in the same way. I think this would give new players a wrong idea of what it really takes to be good at the game. Please don't add this feature. It would be okay as a mod, but I wouldn't use it.

If you were wise, you should know that talking about a subject you haven't investigated might lead to saying bs. Reading what other people in the same case (that didn't investigate) say doesn't count. This thread refer to a specific feature within a specific mod every single comment or almost. Now if you continue to debate with countless references to this feature, chances that you are spreading misinformation are probably absolute, and you won't really know better yourself in the end. Epistemology 101.

I think that it would be helpful to allow mod policies to be determed by each host for themselves, rather than forcing a single policy on everyone, since we all know that isn't going to make everyone happy. Here's how I think this should work: Using ProGUI or other tools should not be against the TOS, and should not result in a ban from the entire Wildfire Games Lobby, even if a player lied about using it but... Hosts should be empowered to implement and enforce their own policies for mod usage. For example, if @real_tabasco_sauce hosts a game and finds out that someone was trying to hide the usage of ProGUI, @real_tabasco_sauce can block that player from future games, but the offending player will still be able to play with other people, such as myself.     I think that the Internet, in general, is best when people are allowed to form their separate communities with their own rules, rather than everyone being forced to agree on one policy. I think community fragmentation is a good thing, as players should be free to pursue fair and enjoyable gameplay, whatever that means for them.     The Terms of Use should be primarily about regulating offensive behavior that is unambiguously harmful, such as posting links to pornography, or harassing individuals, or trying to hack the lobby or other players. Anything further than that should be the responsibility and authority of individual hosts to determine what is allowed in their games.     I think we should stay true to the values of free software, and not include any kind of obfuscation to prevent people from modifying the game if they really want to. What I have seen above is that there are ways for people to confidently detect the usage of ProGUI or similar tools. That's great, and we should leave those players to use whatever means to see fit to enforce their rules, while people like Atrik and myself can choose not to enforce any mod policy, and focus on having a fun game regardless.     I hope that this will allow us to stop fighting over this issue and move forward with the real problems, such as revealing the map.    

@guerringuerrin was describing a system that automatically chooses what barracks to train from, and the batch sizes, and I think someone else mentioned that ProGUI will automatically send units to gather resources at certain proportions depending on the needed resources for the units you want to train, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I do think that these amount to strategic decisions. Batch sizes are a strategic choice because bigger isn't always better. If you are interested in growing your economy, then smaller batch sizes will give you more short-term gains, but larger batch sizes will result in more overall efficiency of your structures. Always choosing the largest batch size that you can isn't always the best strategic choice. This is what I mean when I say that these tools make strategic choices on your behalf. Please don't allow the temporary miscommunications to discourage you. Know that my main purpose for starting this thread is simply to make my voice known, and provide a space for meaningful argumentation. So far, I think I have been mostly successful, and I am very glad I was available to start this thread, and participate in the debate. If anyone thinks I mis-interpreted something, then please correct me. I am not perfect, and just because I didn't understand you the first time doesn't mean I am intentionally spreading misinformation.

Wow, I'm sorry. I created my own thread about a similar topic before I realized that this thread existed. But to be fair, both threads have been meaningful, and their purposes aren't exactly the same... I must say that anyone who is actually suggesting that an anticheat program be included with 0 A.D. is arguing that 0 A.D. should cease to be a free software project. You can say what you want about what kinds of mod checks should be implemented, but that's the facts. You can't stop people from writing code on their own computers, due to the nature of free software. Anticheat solutions inherently require obscurity to work, so there cannot be a free-as-in-freedom anticheat. And I find the idea of using Machine Learning to help cringeworthy, but I digress... After reading this thread in full, I am starting to think that we could use a compromise. I strongly believe that the use of ProGUI, AutoCiv, and similar mods is NOT cheating, and I have my own reasons that I won't dive into here (it's mostly free-software absolutism), but I understand that some people disagree with me, so I would be open to allowing game hosts to decide for themselves what mods to allow, and perhaps a way to see what mods are active on each client, just for the sake of convenience. Nothing super invasive, since it's truly impossible to stop the secret use of mods, but it would mainly serve as a convenience option to make sure people are on the same page, and so those who don't understand the dilemma will have their clients figure it out from them, assuming they haven't modified it for themselves. I, for one, would never discriminate based on mod usage in my games, but I am finally coming to terms with the realization that I can't convince those who take the opposite extreme. However, I do think that there is a separate problem that the full game state is necessarily stored on every client, which makes fog-of-war cheating much easier than it should be. I do believe that it is possible to fully eliminate the risk of this kind of cheating, by redesigning the network protocol so that the game state is stored away from untrusted players, and only partially synced with the clients (again, won't go into too much detail since I have my own thread for this). I think this should be discussed separately from the argument as to the long argument of whether changing the input/output system of the game constitutes changing the game itself (I believe it doesn't). That may allow us to actually accomplish something here.

The quote you use of @guerringuerrin  actually clearly and accurately describe the opposite. That's the main reason these tread have little value, is that people keep referencing a mod speculating on what it does or how, creating almost-myths.

I think I wasn't clear the first time, and I apologize. I think I was wrong to say this: I tried to clarify throughout the rest of the post, but ultimately I created an unnecessary contradiction, which was confusing, and I am sorry. I think it was just sloppy writing that caused my original post to be unclear. I'll edit the post so nobody else gets confused. Let me make myself extra clear as to what I was originally trying to say, as to the definiton of "real-time". Real-time strategy means that there is non-stop action, according to the 0 A.D. vision. This means you must be constantly thinking ahead while reacting quickly, and this does indeed require the ability to concentrate. If you cannot focus for an extended duration of time, this will put you at a disadvantage. What I was trying to say last time, was that this ability to concentrate is not the same thing as being able to do multiple things with one click. You can install a mod that auto-manages the barracks, but still be too tired to actually think about it, and then such a feature becomes useless to you. I believe that a large part of the game's skill curve is the ability to mentally multitask, and focus on multiple things at once. This is something different from being able to click faster. You can click faster, but be unable to concentrate. I would also like to claim that in all of the time that I have been learning to play 0 A.D., I have never once been overwhelmed by needing to click on multiple things at once. My lack of concentration manifests in the form of being unable to click on anything because I don't know what to do. There has never been a point in which my performance was reduced because I could not type fast enough to do everything that I wanted to do. So, you are making the point that these mods actually do make the attempt to make strategic choices on your behalf. This is different from a mod that merely makes it easier to do what you want. Now we are going somewhere. I have already said, in previous posts, that this game has so many diverse choices, and there is not (and should not) be "one right way" to play the game. There are so many strategies to try out, and every single action you take has a strategic meaning, from what proportions of resources to gather at any one time, to where exactly to gather those resources from (you have to think about vulnerable supply lines, and how the enemy could cut you off), and how many storehouses to build, that even if a mod attempts to make a somewhat viable choice on your behalf, there will always be an effective counter-strategy. I would also like to say that it is relatively easy to accomplish simultaneous use of all unit trainers in the vanilla GUI, while not taking your eyes of the front lines even briefly. Just put all of those structures in one control group (I usually do '9'), and then press that number quickly, hit F3, and then if you want 50% spears and 50% slingers, that only takes two clicks. The optimal batch size based on your resource counts isn't that hard either: just scroll up until the box becomes red, and you know the largest batch size that you can train (which isn't always the best strategic choice, by the way). That is a routine part of my muscle memory, and it only takes me a second or two, so someone whose computer does this for them wouldn't have a significant advantage over me, and I'm not even good player by any metric. I know you said to avoid subjective arguments such as this one, because someone else may play differently, but I'm just trying to give a real-world example to put some of the ProGUI tools into perspective. That may be true, but this game has such a depth of strategy, that any tool that automatically determines what units to train, and what resources they should gather, is not going to be able to make the "best" choice in every circumstance, unless that tool has such complex logic that it could be described as artificial intelligence. If a programmer wants to put in that much effort to design such tools "just to enable players to cheat", then let them; we need a better A.I. player than Petra Bot. Obviously, these mods will not actively stop you from playing the game how you want using the existing vanilla tools, but if you allow them to pick your economic strategy for you, they will not always pick the same strategy that you would have chosen if you had done it yourself. And if you choose to take all of your attention span off of the autonomously-managed economy, then you won't be aware of the potential tactical vulnerabilities of your supply lines, in the same way that you would be if you had carefully planned out and built them yourself. That definition from Wikipedia doesn't really help either side. And just because it was on Wikipedia doesn't mean we have to abide by it. Again, I was unclear the first time due to sloppy writing, and I apologize, but what I am really saying is that mental overload, and mechanical overload, are two totally different things. Personally, I have never experienced the latter. You said that someone who can do more things simultaneously will have an advantage. But I said that how many things I can do simultaneously isn't actually the problem, it's my ability to keep track of everything so I can make the next move based on the optimal strategy. If you install a mod that handles one or more of the components of the game, it doesn't make you a better player, or even seem like a better player beyond summary numbers. The mod will choose the simplest solution, which won't always be the best solution. Maybe a super noob who doesn't even know how to play would seem to be greatly aided by the tools that you are all describing, but that's because they don't know how to play. But the people who use these tools aren't super noobs who desperately want to feel good about themselves; they are good players who use these tools to allow them to use the same strategies they always would, but with fewer keystrokes. They will still think about where their resources are coming from, which will always take the same amount of attention, but once they have made their informed choice, they don't have to tediously implement their action. I will go ahead and say that I haven't tried ProGUI, and I don't think that matters. What ProGUI can or can't do is not essential to my argument, and I hope I am making it clear that I believe that there can be no such thing as a GUI mod that I would consider cheating, and cheating only happens when someone actually defeats a core game mechanic, like fog-of-war. However, I might actually try ProGUI sometime and share my thoughts, just for fun. But let me stress that my opinion will be unchanged by it, because I believe that good players are good not because they can click faster, but because they can think fast and see the potential strategic consequences of every decision they make, better than any mod can. Admittedly, I don't know a whole lot about Age of Empires, but I do know that the stated design goal in the 0 A.D. vision is that a good player should be good because they can think strategically, not because they can click faster than everyone else by repeatedly going back to the barracks. I believe that this necessarily means that we should allow these "cheat" mods, because if we have succeeded at our stated design goal, then the secret use of these mods should not matter any more than the secret use of better equipment, or coffee, or other metrics. The point is that we are allowed to be different. Actually, I should be careful. I, myself, said that these mods are comparable to drinking coffee, but what I really want to say is even that isn't really true. Again, I don't feel actually limited by my click rate, only my ability to keep track of everything. These tools do automate some actions, and they can make strategic choices on your behalf, but I wouldn't see that as bypassing the need for me to actually think strategically, since the choices that the computer makes for me won't always be the best choice, unless the mod is so complex that it can be compared to A.I. more than any UX mod. I believe that it is impossible to enforce such a rule without making 0 A.D. at least partially nonfree, something I gather we are not going to do any time soon. Even with our small, tight-knit community where cheaters aren't a real problem (at least according to @TheCJ), it would be a bad decision to claim that these tools should be banned, because we can't enforce that, and as the community grows, any holes in our security should become a problem. I think it would be better to at least consider reworking our networking model to fix the problem with reveal-map cheating, as I described above. Then we can think about whether we want to have a section of our community dedicated to people who actually care about the setup that other players are using. Simulation speed and reaction time One thing that I recently thought about was the fact that, when setting up a game (and even during a singleplayer game), you can change the simulation speed to be a factor of the normal speed. There are different choices, with different names such as "Relaxed (0.5x)", or "Insane (2x)". This implies that there is an additional difficulty curve to playing the game at a faster speed. I agree with this, but as I said, the difficulty curve comes from being able to think fast, not being able to type fast. I don't think I really have to explain this further than I already have above; just know for now that I do agree that real-time implies a challenge that is not shared with turn-based strategy games, and this is generally not essential to my point. Of course, there will be a point in which the game is so fast that an entire army can get defeated in the time it takes for you to reach for your mouse. This is probably why the game doesn't let you go faster than 2x for real-time play. If you were playing at 16x, then the game is so fast that most of the difficulty curve comes from being able to click fast enough, and I don't think that would be a fun or engaging experience at all. Think about if you were competing with someone in a rated 0 A.D. game at 32x game speed. What strategy would you use to get an advantage? Your strategy would probably have more to do with how you use the keyboard than how you actually play the game, at that point. Does that sound like fun to you? Just some food for though.